Presenting the Keynote And Breakout At TechFuse 2009

I will be presenting the keynote and a breakout session at Techfuse (NOT TechEd) on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 in Brooklyn Park, MN.

My keynote sessions synopsis is (taking into account I despise esoteric keynotes that are full of marketing, I choose a more pragmatic path :) )

Title:

Building a Commissionable, Development Aware Virtualized SharePoint Environment

Summary:

Constructing a commissionable collaboration environment that lessens friction for at-will server provisioning is commonly one of the most time-consuming tasks when designing a SharePoint environment targeting flexibility however controlling proliferation. There are certain components required from both a development and architectural perspective; operating systems, applications, service packs, and updates being a few examples. Reproducing these environments on a repetitive piece-meal basis can be attributed to one of the most inefficient processes in an organization, frustrating for both the operations and development departments.

There are several compelling reasons for an organization to virtualize a SharePoint environment. From a cost perspective the immediate benefit of a reduced hardware footprint coupled with lessened physical space requirements, arguably these are the most visible. Furthermore, management and maintenance of the virtualized SharePoint environment is eased, allowing service levels to increase since servers can be provisioned for everything from implementing redundancy to providing siloed testing environments for component testing.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 out of the System Center Server Management Suite provides a powerful virtualization scheme (utilizing hypervisor-based virtualization) allowing a commission and decommissioning architecture that, when coupled with SharePoint, provides redundant operations architecture and adaptable development environments to properly support an SDLC. As opposed to scaling tasks that normally takes weeks, VMM allows SharePoint architects to provide a robust solution set to tackle time consuming tasks in a fraction of the time.

The first portion of this session will demonstrate building virtualized SharePoint environment following down to the metal best practices. The preliminary design will be in accordance with simple small farm architecture. Scenario based implementations will follow to demonstrate the introduction of new servers into the environment, along with the benchmarks advised in order to govern the provisioning procedures. From an operations standpoint, this should equip the audience with enough information in order to start to build self-sustaining performance metrics and the associate required actions in order to maintain desirable operational service levels.

The second portion of this session will describe best practices approaches to provide organizational developers with an appropriate development environment that follows a prescribed lifecycle. While the operational component will heavily focus on roles, utilizations, and responses, the development end will focus on maintain a structured SharePoint development process. The preliminary design will demonstrate single instance virtualized development sandboxes, with integrated a conflict reduction architecture pushing to a centralized build machine (for build and testing before sending to QA) leveraging Team Foundation Server. Using build events, a structured process will also be demonstrated in order to examine how to automate orthodox build pushes, tackling a majority of deployment scenarios. This should equip both the operations and development audience measures with an agreeable approach that eases both parties rhythmic daily tasks.

For my breakout session I will be presenting on SharePoint security froom both an architectural as well as development perspective.

You can find out more about TechFuse here, and it will be hosted at The Northland Inn in Brooklyn Park: